Earl Norman

The Earl Norman books are becoming extremely rare, and publishers don’t seem to be interested in reprinting the series. The only way some of us may ever have all the stories is for collectors to scan and type the stories into PDF to swap with other collectors. I have already completed PDFs of HANG ME IN HONG KONG and KILL ME IN ROPPONGI. I am working on KILL ME IN YOKOSUKA. If other collectors would do the same for some of the other books, we could eventually have PDFs of all ten books. Why not help? I can be contacted at fadingshadows40@gmail.com

Friday, January 16, 2015

Land of Precious Snow

“Land
of Precious Snow” by Thaddeus Tuleja.
Young Jethro Dey and his father travel to Tibet in search of precious
white gold, but they are attacked by bandits and all are killed. Jethro
believes he is also dead, but after a few days lying in the frozen snow, a man
appears almost as a vision, naked, but unaffected by the cold and ice. He tends
to the young American for several months until he is strong enough to travel,
then the old man leads him to a monastery many miles away. In the meantime, one
of his friends has set out to find Jethro and his dad, hoping they are still
alive. It is a long journey, and finally they meet at the monastery. But now
Jethro is a new man, and wishes to remain, not for the gold, but for deeper
understanding. He gives up his belief in Christian religion, and accepts
Eastern beliefs. This was written in Victorian style, as indeed, it’s the era
the story takes place. I’ve never been a fan of Victorian fiction, however. The
author is a historian, and also wrote the K’ing Kung Fu series as Marshall
Macao, another series I couldn’t get into. “Land of Precious Snow” was supposed
to be the first in a new Green Lama series, with Jethro Dumont’s name changed
to Jethro Dey. This novel, however, was merely how Jethro reached the
monastery, and the writing was too academic to be of interest. There were
supposed to be three more novels after this one, but none appeared. Probably
due to the negative response the first story received. We never see him as The
Green Lama, so the book was a waste.